Poems for June 11

 Barb will be hosting.  NO MEETING  June 18.

June 11: Ode to Teachers by Pat Mora; (from Dizzy in Your Eyes, 2010); The Leash  by Ada Limon (from The Carrying, 2018) ; Cuttings by Theodore Roethke (from The Lost Son & other poems, 1948); The Raspberry Room by Karin Gottshall (from Crocus, 2007); Soul Make a Path Through Shouting by Cyrus Cassells (title poem from book of same name, 1994, ); But We Had Music by Maria Poplova

Do listen to this reading of the final poem.  : https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/06/but-we-had-music/

Poems for June 4

  

The Maples by Marie Howe[1]Hymn by Marie Howe[1] The Story Wheel by Joy Harjo; Chinese Silence No. 22 by Timothy Yu (after Billy Collins, "Monday")  
The Want of Peace by Wendell Berry; How to Regain Your Soul by William Stafford

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[1] the hyperlink takes you to: https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/04/marie-howe-hymn/?mc_cid=b36e88d513&mc_eid=2e713bf367

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[1] The hyperlink takes you to: https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/05/16/marie-howe-the-maples/?mc_cid=b36e88d513&mc_eid=2e713bf367

Nutshell of discussion.

First of all, apologies for labeling the poems for June 3.  We did indeed meet Wednesday, June 4. 

Several people remarked that the theme threading this week, was to find solace in Nature, take a step back, refresh the  soul.

The Marginalian links are refreshing reminders to look within to find "what to do with our one wild life", a popular theme of poetry which knows so well how to embrace paradox, doubt and all the emotions associated.  

The Maples:  Here, using the poetic credo, "show, don't tell", the title launches us to the main character: a stand of maples.  The poet enters with her question, "How should I live my life?"  You cannot say their response "shhh   shhh   shhh  shhh ..." in a hurry.  Nor perhaps is that a response to the question but rather a way of being.  Try saying that back to them in the breeze as they "ripple and gleam" and you might adopt it as way to quiet your innermost worries.  

Elmer shared that now is the time to admire the Black Locusts in bloom.  You might enjoy this link to find out more about this amazing tree.  Jan brought up another book about plants:  The Light Eaters.

 

What does Marie do in this poem that engages us?  Clearly, she is not offering a sermon, but rather a personal meditation that touches the universal challenge of answering within oneself the question, "How shall I live".

First, she shares her thought of useful advice to herself:  "stand still... see how long you can bear that. " the next couplet picks up, as if to confirm in the stanza break that perhaps standing still was not so easy. Repeating  "try to stand still" --with  the added encouragement,  "if only for a few moments,"  line break,

to the final line.  Have you ever tried to drink light?  Can you do it while breathing?  Note the space between drinking light             breathing.  It makes me glad to have read the poem and eager to try it myself.  

Hymn:  Here, Marie Howe chooses tercets, with the third line indented, and connects the enjambed stanza breaks with third line  propelling to the next thought.  The sounds are rich, indeed, like a congregation gathering voices, as if a 5 stanza hymn to being human, in a world that contains galaxies, our immediate moon and sun.  She continues  her "song without words" (and I think of Mendelssohn's music of that title) as "snow conceives snow/// conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame  -- / the hum turning again higher-- into a riff of ridges/ "peaks hard as consonants//", a praise song filled with details of oceans, what lies above, below, on to the final 4 stanzas  our earth "turning to dawn"... as we humans mirror rising/lying downand then note the break to the last stanza :  the human hymn of praise for every"/  (I pointed out the importance of pausing on the "every" which lands on 

"something else there is and ever was and will be.".  Something else, perhaps implies art, and what humans create, say, enact to praise the "else" which is not us.

Does the final parenthesis work?  Perhaps some of us feel skeptical at such a description of harmony, such bigness we can barely conceive making such music?  The  verb "Listen"  can be understood both as command -- (Listen to this), and a confessional aside, as if having an intimate conversation, and connecting the poet, as human, to the reader.  Indeed, reading a is a conversation between poet and reader.  The idea of a dream, speaks to transcendence.  Another fine poem which asks us to engage with it, leaving us energized by the interaction. 

The Story Wheel: Perhaps you are familiar with the "medicine wheels" of the Lakota, the importance of the story teller in Pueblo culture.  The opening stanza addresses this "story of forever" where all is connected and everyone finds their way back together.  The final line with the double meaning "no one really lost at all"  both in the sense of the story wheel as map, and in the sense of a battle where it is not a question of winning or losing, but a cycle of ceremonies for celebrating and grieving.  Some felt the poem was disjointed, the parts not quite fitting, and yet, reading aloud, the words weave a whole civilization, and its enduring story.

Chinese Silence No. 22:  If you go to this site https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/timothy-yu, you will find out more about this most interesting poet, his reasoning behind his poems.  If you go to this site you will find out more about this most interesting poet, and his thinking behind his poems.  In this interview he cites a reference to John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs, and recites #14 which he uses in his Chinese Dream #14. He exchanges the word "Life" with "Race" to examine more deeply the clichés and traps that encourage people to consider a topic "boring", as if there is no sense in discussing it.

Poems like to "illuminate" the human condition, find the "universal" but Timothy is curious about how we are different and feels this is important to explore.  

He plays with other poems as well as Billy Collins poem "Monday"

Chinese Silence No. 30 after Eleanor Goodman, "Boston's Chinatown"

Chinese Silence No. 14 after Billy Collins, "Silence"

Chinese Silence  No. 92: After “Exile’s Letter” by Ezra Pound

Chinese Silence  No. 36 -- the epigraph:

To make a Chinese poem in English we must allow the silence to creep in around the edges, to define the words the way the sky’s negative space in a painting defines the mountains.

—Tony Barnstone, “The Poem Behind the Poem”

 Elaine also wondered if there was a connection with Maxine Hong Kingston, and her 1976 memoir (The Woman Warrior) 

and also brought up this powerful  poem (Immigrant Blues) by Li Young Lee one of the many that are referenced here

I love how poems interrelate with other poems/writing/history, providing the rich potentiality of different directions.

The general feeling of reading this long poem was one of "mixed results" : some good imitations of the Billy Collins poem, which in turn is a bit uneven, albeit laced with his usual wit, and a sense of a compilation of compressed stereotypes, a hint of history.  

Silence, the word,  is in each stanza but the last two... It is cultivated, swept, or simply there; 3 flavors of 100 kinds, a lame comparison of the film Crocodile Dundee to the Australian and Mel G. to the Scot.  Without reading the interview, it might be hard to see he is working to undermine "silence", see some of the noisy bricks in the "wall of language", we might not be aware of.

The Want of Peace:  Want, as in lack of, and want as in need or desire for.  Most people are aware of Berry's poem, Peace of Wild Things, where there is no need to "tax himself with forethought of grief".  We admired the sound of the word, "wholly" how like "want" a "hole" is round, as is a "whole", a Holy connection.  We wondered if the mention of buying fire was specific to weapons, given his anti-war stand, to the "burning man" festival or perhaps an more antique notion of Prometheus stealing fire.  Dumb, as in mute, seems filled with the Timothy Yu idea of "silence" which is much more than the word, or the idea of an "underground" life.  

How to Regain Your Soul:  The title offers an explicit diving board into the first stanza which tells you where to go.

The second stanza reminds you of the complexity history, but starts with Above, air sighs the pines.  

This prompted Judith to site the opening lines of Evangeline

"This is the forest primeval....

Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest...

The on-going, eternal aliveness of air.  Butterflies, as soul, rebirth, are mentioned three times.  Outside of you, white ones.  Finally, no mention of the butterfly, only the soul, pulling... shining back through white wings -- and that unexpected  finish -- to be you / line break/ again. 

for while I'm gone.

 

For while I'm gone:

 

Aug. 20: Elaine Richane

August - Mary Oliver; United  by Naomi Shihab Nye; 

Ghazal: America the Beautiful  by Alicia Ostriker  (maybe not?)

Day of the Refugios  by Alberto Ríos

I Hear America Singing  by Walt Whitman

 

Aug. 27:  Bernie Shore

In Our Blindness, Chalked Up To Just Be Fate  by Robert Lindley (11- 21-2019

Heavenly Length  by Bill Holm (1943-2009)[1]

Carrying Paul  by Ted Kooser

Opening by Tess Gallaher (from Poems from Is, Is Not)

Two poems by U Tak[2] 1263 - 1343

At the Fair  by Edith Sitwell

 

September 3 :  Elaine

 

Sept. 10

September 17

 

September 24 -- Bernie

Poems from Is, Is Not  by Tess Gallager: 

Recognition; Hummingbird-Mind;  Blue Eyelid Lifting; Cloud Path

My Species, by Jane Hirshfield

 

 

Oct. 1

Oct. 8

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[1] A popular contributor to Writers Almanac: 

BILL HOLM was born to Icelandic immigrants on a farm north of Minneota, Minnesota in 1943. A long-time resident of Minneota, Holm lived with his wife Marcie and taught at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall from 1980 until he retired in 2007. He traveled widely, to Iceland on a Fulbright in 1979, and more recently to his summer home in Hofsos; and to China, where he taught on an academic exchange program in 1986 and again in 1992. The recipient of the 2008 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, Holm is the author of several books of essays and poetry including, most recently, The Windows of Brimnes. Known both regionally and nationally as a humorist, writer, and prairie radical, Bill Holm passed away on February 26, 2009. -- Marianne CombsMarch 21, 2011 6:00 AM

[2] U Tak, born in 1263, was a Korean philosopher of neo-Confucianism and poet. He died in 1343.

Joy Harjo:  Eddy's share:  her book “An American Sunrise” and there have been poems that also mention “story” in a kind of metaphorical sense.  One poem is “The Story Wheel” (photo below), and another is “Washing My Mother’s Body”, in which she says “The story is all there, in her body, as I wash her to prepare her / to be let down into earth, and return all stories to the earth.” And later, “I emerged from the story, dripping with the waters of memory.” Lastly, I interpret “Without” as Harjo expressing a desire to meet her “beloved rascal” again, maybe after death. The poem was written too early to be about this, but I believe her daughter Rainy Dawn Ortiz passed away in 2023. (A poem she wrote: 

https://poets.org/poem/more-something-else). So I don’t know who the “beloved rascal” is…

 

great poem selection:  https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/?f=flair_name%3A"Poem"

More Than Something Else

• 
• 
• 
• 

Rainy Dawn Ortiz

1973 – 

2023

Something Else.

Some one else

Some where else

That place is here,

In my home,

We are here.

I am brown,

Brown hair,

Brown eyes,

Like cookies Feather tells me, and I like to think it’s perfectly

cooked Pueblo cookies.

My kids are something else,

9 different shades of brown,

All beautiful.

My grandkids are something else,

4 brown eyes, 2 blue eyes,

All Native,

Definitely something else, as I watch them be rowdy, be loving,

be here in this world.

We are here

On this earth

In this time and place

In our homes,

On our lands,

In the cities,

With our families, laughing loudly, cooking together, protecting

each other.

We are something else

With our songs

Our dances.

We pray with corn meal,

Eagle feathers,

Medicine bundles,

Burn some sage, make sure to acknowledge the four directions,

as the sun comes up.

We are the something else,

Who were here,

To greet Christopher Columbus

We were born from

This earth,

Crawled out of the center,

Of our mother’s womb, we are important, we are strong.

We are something else,

We are Pueblo people, Plains people, Forest People, Desert

people, Nomadic people, Cliff dwellers, Ocean fishers, Lake and

river fishers, hunters, medicine collectors, horse riders, artists,

speakers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, we are human beings.

We are something else,

We are Native People,

Indigenous to this land.

We are a proud,

Something else.